Maybe you've noticed I've been updating Kind Words a lot lately. It's all been in preparation for today! Kind Words 2 is now available!

What does this change for the original Kind Words?

• More players
• More stickers

What's the difference between the two games?

Stickers: Now that there are SEVENTY FIVE stickers in the game, we have to be a little more mindful about the space on disk and memory that they take up. This update uses some smarter compression options that won't change how they look but will reduce the game's build size by about 80mb. Favorites: Thanks to the multiple users who reported a softlock if you tried to view the favorites page before you've ever favorited anything. The old favorites system used to take a little time to check if you have no favorites. In a recent update I made it super fast to check your favorite count. Yay! Except that the system was expecting at least one frame of delay when checking. I made it so fast it broke. I'm the greatest?

With apologies to the many users who got a little scared when their stickers disappeared, I present this humble bug fix. Your stickers were never really gone. They were always in your hearts. But I understand that you wanted them on your screen too. So that's where they should be now. Also, things get less weird now if your internet keeps turning on and off. That's what the whole sticker bug was about. The game would lose connection with the server and the game's response was not "Remain calm. it will be ok. These things happen." it was "Forget all stickers". Should be better now. Yours, Ziba

Remember that period of a few years when there were no new stickers for Kind Words? Those were dark times. I'm glad we all made it safely here to the future. A future where we dropped new stickers last month and are now teasing even more for next month. TEASE!
Consider yourself teased. These 12 new stickers are coming to all Kind Words 1 players for free so that you can swap them with Kind Words 2 players when that game comes out on October 7th. Yours, Ziba & Luigi

You may have already noticed new stickers sliding in to your inbox. You may also have noticed a ton of new players writing a lot more responses this week. Kind Words activity has always been strong, but lately it's is doing numbers it hasn't seen in a few years. That's because we've opened up Kind Words 2 playtesting to everybody for a limited time. And since they're on the same server, Kind Words is extra busy. So it's a fantastic time to jump back in and share some kind letters. Show the new arrivals just how gosh darn caring you can be. Also, come on over and play the demo for KW2! Yours, Ziba & Luigi

Thanks for the bug reports!

• The sticker name "SuperMegaUltraMan" was too long to fit on in the space provided.
• Exporting your message history could get stuck exporting....FOREVER.
• Some new stickers are hiding inside the game binary waiting to be released by Kind Words 2 players who will be talking to you soon. Yes, they would also just be downloaded from the Kind Words server if they weren't inside the game, but I wanted to put them out to everybody via Steam first cause they have big strong servers and I have to be a little careful with mine.

The slicker sticker picker is also quicker. Don't worry, the cute sticker sheets are still there when you're decorating your room. But when you're choosing which sticker to send to somebody, there's a much faster way to review your adorable inventory. But why, 5 years after launch and a year since the last update, would we push a seemingly small quality-of-life update? A) Because we love you B) It's actually a much bigger update Kind Words 2 is coming and it will run on the same server as Kind Words. People playing KW2 will be sending you letters with new stickers they find. That means the original Kind Words needs to be able to understand what the heck is attached to those letters. Also, since there's no room associated with the new sticker, Kind Words needs a new interface for you to enjoy the sticker and to choose it if you want to gift it to someone else. Therefore:
The behind the scenes magic is this: stickers no longer have to be built in to the game. We can add new stickers to the server and the game will know what to do. In fact, this update brings in 3 years of work we've done on the component of Kind Words 2 that talks to the server. We rewrote how the game talks to the server for greater reliability, efficiency and flexibility. And now Kind Words and Kind Words 2 share the same "client library". This is an important part of our commitment to supporting both games for a long time. This update also uses the latest stable version of the Unity game engine. Also, I fixed a silly typo on the help screen. Thanks to the multiple users who pointed it out. Spelling has never been my strong suit. Good thing my job requires me to write things lots of people read. Oh, and KW2 playtesting will open up again pretty soon. So sign up, wishlist and say hi on our discord. Cheers, Ziba & Luigi

We like you too much to stop adding free things to Kind Words. And so I find myself sitting on a pile of 20+ new stickers that Luigi made which will soon find their way in to your letters. We actually made all these stickers for Kind Words 2 (you did wishlist Kind Words 2, right?). But since Kind Words and Kind Words 2 players can send letters to each other, everybody gets all the stickers! What are these stickers, exactly? I'm not telling. We have to keep some mystery in our relationship. But here's a teaser:
Kind Words will get these new stickers but, and for this I apologize, only Kind Words 2 gets the cool new rooms that go along with the stickers. I know, I know. I don't really want to create fomo. That's clearly not our brand. But we gotta save SOME shiny new stuff just for #2. In summary, hang tight, do nothing and a batch of sweet new stickers will start showing up on your letters this year. (also please, please wishlist KW2 so it does well and we can keep making free stickers forever) Yours, Ziba & Luigi

Wanna be a little less alone today? We'd love for you to drop in and say hi through the Kind Words 2 demo. We've put together a slice of the upcoming game for everybody to try out!

• Have short chats with other players in the neighborhood!
• Go in to the bookstore and swap media recommendations!
• Hop in to the clothes store and try on all the (totally free) clothes!
• Give names to strange cats!

Dear Kind Words Players,

Kind Words and Kind Words 2 players can send letters back and forth to each other.

Ok, now this is just getting silly. Kind Words has been out for four years and people are still writing THOUSANDS OF LETTERS EVERY DAY. Well then, I guess we'll keep updating it! Thanks to the big server overhaul we did last month, we can add something people have been asking for from the very beginning:

Favorites!

Full Changelist

• Added a favorites system
• Moved the screensavers button to the "more" section
• Updated help page text and links
• Letter response font will auto-size if it's too long to fit on the page
• Changed the quit icon from a pillow to an open door
• Changed the decorate room icon from a face to a room
• Made camera grain effect stay constant with screen resolution changes
• Made the request input field behave like airplanes and responses when reaching the size limit
• Fixed a soft lock that could occur if making a report failed
• Fixed an issue checking the validity of a sticker granted by a thanks
• Replaced Twitter link with Mastodon link
• Removed the "3 Year" badge. Cause it's 4 years now.

Short version:

Long version:

Players have been asking for a record for ages. Sorry it took us a while to get here, but we wanted do it right.
Records are about the music (and you'll get Clark's beautiful tracks), but they're also a keepsake. A physical manifestation of your personal connection to a feeling you love. That's why we crafted this as a little bundle of the best parts of Kind Words made real. That's why you get:

• Clark Aboud's lo-fi & dreamy tracks
• A choice of "Pink and Violet Firefly Swirl" or "Midnight Purple Mixtape"
• Two postcards to write nice letters on and send to people!
• A sheet of stickers from the game! You could put them on the postcards!
• It's like you're playing the game in real life!!!
• Heartfelt letters from the team!

This week marks 3 years since Kind Words launched! That's 3 years and over 5 million letters and airplanes shared between strangers lifting each other up. While it's amazing to us that Kind Words found an audience, it's shocking and humbling to us that you're all still here! After all this time, you're still writing thousands of messages every day! I still can't believe we get to facilitate this wacky experiment-turned-way-of-life. Luigi and I try to honor that privilege by moderating the game 7 days a week. Being such a small team, we're especially grateful to the community members in game, discord and forums who help with questions. One funny side effect of the never ending parade of new users is that statistically unlikely problems become, well, more likely! Lightning strikes, cosmic radiation, internet gremlins, literal bugs inside computers. None of those seemed important to prepare for in 2019 when we were making a game we thought 100 people would play. Anyways, that's my excuse for why a mangled save file could confuse the game and prevent it from running. Today's update includes a much better effort at making Kind Words save files fault tolerant. If Valve accidentally turns all your cloud saves in to cat jpgs, Kind Words will no longer overwrite your local save with it and try to load it. If you cut and paste a recipe for baked cod over your local save file. Kind Words can't bring it back. I'm not magic. But at least now it won't just stop working, it will open the save file manager and explain that it can't read the save file. We also included a cute little 3 year celebration emblem on the title screen.
Thank you so much for being a part of this. Your support has motivated and empowered us to keep Kind Words running and to work on other projects, some public (wishlist Cyrano!) and others that we're not ready to talk about just yet Keep on being kind. Yours, Ziba & Luigi

How sexy is that, right? We added a save file manager! Even better: I recommend you never ever use it! Wow! These updates just get better and better! In all seriousness, for 99% of people you don't need to ever think twice about your save file. There should be only one and there should be no problem with it. However, this save file manager is for you if: * You're on a mac and your save file seems to have disappeared recently. * You don't use steam cloud but you manually copy save files between computers. * Something really weird that shouldn't have happened, happened. This new tool, accessed from the options page, will help you discover and select what save file to use. Hopefully on to funnerer stuff now!

I finally fixed Steam Cloud Saves on MacOS. Sorry it took so long. I had to do some things. Like get a mac. As a tiny bonus, I've added a font size slider to the screensaver modes for all platforms. Fun fact: the screensaver mode was something I wrote in partnership with the Science Gallery in Melbourne for an exhibit they made on Kind Words. I like to leave it running on an old screen in my kitchen so I can walk by and see people's words of encouragement throughout the day and so that I know the server is still running and I don't have to panic. Technical Caveat: If you used cloud save previously and then started fresh on a mac without cloud save, your old cloud save file may now come back and overwrite your fresh start. Don't worry, the game will detect this and backup your fresh save as kindwords.json1. You can verify that this is what happened by looking for kindwords.json1 in the same directory that the game will display to you when you use the "export" function. If that happens and you wish to replace your old cloud save with your fresh start, use the in-game option to completely delete your current save. Close the game and then replace kindwords.json with kindwords.json1. Hopefully this won't affect anyone and I'm being paranoid. But not losing your letters is pretty important to me. As always, reach me at support@popcannibal.com or discord.gg/popcannibal if you have questions.

I rolled back the tiny change on the mac version due to reports of missing save data. Very sorry for the trouble. Life is a grand mystery and part of that mystery is what the game engine I'm using snuck in to minor point releases of their stable release branch.

Well this is a cute little very specific update. In the last few days we've had an influx of players from China! Welcome! You're doing a great job being kind to each other, but a number of players have gotten one thing confused: The report button sends messages to ME and LUIGI, the moderators. It does NOT send a message to the person you are reporting. You can't use the report button to talk back to people. Sorry! This update adds one-time-only message from Ella the Mail deer when you make a report to remind you that you're sending a report to the moderators and not to another player. I hope this is a proper translation : You can not reply to people using the "REPORT" button. REPORT This update also changes the description on the Abe Lincoln sticker to use the word "enslaved" instead of "slaves", because in this context we are talking about a burden put upon people and not an all encompassing definition of who they were. Thank you to the player who made that suggestion! There's also a tiny increment in the version of Unity used for this release. Shouldn't change anything. Probably. That's all for this update. I know it's been a while since we've had a meatier update. It may surprise absolutely no one who follows me to learn that I've been rewriting parts of the backend AGAIN. Lots of invisible work going on behind the scenes to make sure Kind Words has a long life and a stable foundation on which to grow. Cheers! Ziba

Wishlist Cyrano now!

Small fixes:

• Stopped the Duck Kami sticker from looking like a Bleeper when you put it on a letter.
• Fixed not being able to delete responses if your inbox was sorted by request.
• Changing your signature initial used to have a delay before being reflected locally.
• Clicking on the version on the title screen now takes you to the steam news page instead of the static game website.

Two years in and over 4 million messages sent!

If you're not gonna stop then we're not gonna either!

Is anyone moderating Kind Words? [/olist] The answer to both is: heck yes, all the time. Usage goes up and down, but on a slow day, we're still transmitting a couple thousand letters between players. And we are moderating constantly and always improving our moderation tools. For every update to the game, I make 10 updates to the backend. Faster, smarter, stronger, purpler. Also, we. Hold on. Duck...
Where was I? Anyways, speaking of moderation, with this update we're doing two things to help keep things kind and on-topic. First, we're letting people directly delete responses they no longer want to have in their inboxes. Second, we're going to ask you to confirm some things before you try to do them like... are you trying to send a stranger your discord handle? Or your email? And we'll gently remind you that we gotta keep it anonymous to keep it safe. Full change notes:

• New room!
• New stickers!
• Added the ability to delete responses you've received.
• Sorted unopened letters to show up on top of your pile.
• Will ask you to confirm before sending if it looks like you're breaking rules.
• Prevented the escape key from erasing what you just typed.
• Updated to Unity 2020.3.16

Thanks once more for living this wild experiment in caring with us. Yours, Ziba & Luigi

In a regrettable and unintentional lapse into excessively Anglocentric behavior, I did not account for the significant portion of the world that uses non-Gregorian calendars. More clearly restated: It's not 2021 everywhere, in fact it's 1442 some places and those places could not play Kind Words after the last update. My apologies! Also the screensavers weren't showing more than one airplane in a row. Booo. So I fixed those things and to sweeten the deal I put a little more spit shine on the Room Screen Saver. Now the camera doesn't just float there, you get a tour of all your decorations while it's running.
Yours, Ziba

We're at a year and change now and you haven't slowed down! You're still writing each other thousands of messages every day. We are humbled to have Kind Words become a regular part of so many people's lives and, in keeping with long-standing international custom for developer-player relations, we offer you this traditional gift: a giant, looming beast and some mittens.
In fact, since you've exchanged well over 3 million messages, we are soaring past the the beast-mitten requirement to bring you:

• A new room in a warm wooden cabin with a string of twinkling lights!
• Steam trading cards!
• 10 new stickers! Each with matching room objects. Including this guy...

• More efficient and error tolerant network code.
• Autofocusing on text input fields whenever they appear.
• The request list is refreshed every time you view it.
• Fixed a bug which could cause new stickers not to get the big fanfare they deserve when first seen.
• The options menu can now be accessed from the title screen.
• Lowered the volume. Why was it so loud?
• Updated the underlying engine to Unity 2019.4.18.
• Showing a "connecting..." message on the title screen if it's taking too long to connect. So that you know what it's up to. It's trying to connect.

Happy Steamiversary!

Musical Interlude

A New Room!

More stickers for everybody!

Screen Savers!

Bug Fixes and Improvements!

• Fixed a couple problems preventing Ella from alerting you about new letters.
• You can cancel out of reporting a message without selecting a reason first.
• No more sending empty airplanes! People weren't really abusing it. But it was silly.
• The scarecrow sticker is no longer sideways in a bunch of places. That wacky guy.
• Upgraded the game engine (Unity) to 2019.4.10
• Somehow the whole thing is a couple megabytes smaller. Not really sure how that happened. Bit gremlins probably.

A Million Letters!

New Room and Stickers!

• 10 new stickers
• each with a new decoration
• and a new blue room in which to enjoy them!

New Inbox

Options Galore!

• A buffet of graphical options!
• You can change the signature that is automatically appended to letters!
• A wildly dangerous button for erasing your save game! (It does ask you to confirm)

Various Things That I've Lumped Under One Heading

• Big performance improvements for older machines
• A warning if you start the game on a computer that's probably too old to play it
• Link to the FAQ in help
• Minor visual contrast improvements on the help screen
• 27.8MB smaller, even with the new room!
• Updated to Unity 2019.3

Dramatic Conclusion

It's almost time for an update to Kind Words! Wholesome Games is having a showcase and we thought we'd chip in a fistful of wholesome by premiering a little trailer for our next update! Tune in Tuesday, May 26th, 1pm ET to https://www.wholesomegames.com/ and learn the answers to all your burning questions:

• Is it stickers? It's stickers, right?
• WHAT STICKERS ARE THEY?
• Is there anything more than stickers? That would be neat.
• How long are you going to keep me away from my new stickers?

How can games change you? How can they weave reality, fantasy and aspiration into something other than escapism? Who got out of their pajamas today? Happens live at the very start of the festival and then gets re-run till Tuesday. But all the cool audience members (like you) will be tuning in live. Official blurb! Panelists: Ata Sergey Nowak, Matthew Seiji Burns, Paula Rogers, Jrg Friedrich Alex Paterson, Ziba Scott In this exciting panel we explore games and developers that utilize the uniquely powerful medium to create meaningful experiences about real world problems; provoking thoughts, increasing awareness and making an emotional impact to change the world for the better. LudoNaraCon 2020

More lofi! More chill! More beats! You may recall that Ella, the female mail deer, has a side gig bringing you fresh tunes every day that you write a letter. Well, she just found SEVEN more tracks. Just keep coming back to write and they're yours. Mildly compelling backstory Before launching, I daydreamed: "If this thing actually took off, I'd love to commission more music". Well, you all made my dream come true. Clark Aboud has produced 7 new tracks that go in to the game today. They have a wider range of feeling, including a triplet of "Connector" pieces that are like deep breathing for your ears. The new music is also now in the soundtrack DLC plus we've added lossless FLAC format recordings of everything. More feelings I'm so honored that people are choosing to spend their time here and proud of all the effort players have made to lift each other up. Also, I fixed some bugs and tweaked some things! Full changelog!

• 7 new songs
• Added a volume slider for sound effects (really just Ella's voice)
• Removed a game stutter when changing music
• Fixed a bug which would announce the wrong stickers on game start
• Fixed a song ordering issue when viewing the radio after unlocking a track
• Fixed the mental health link when composing airplanes
• Fixed a tutorial typo
• Fixed a bug which made letters with no stickers appear to have the Elegy sticker
• Upgraded to Unity 2019.4.11f1
• Did, like, 80 million things to the server to make moderation easier and prevent the whole enterprise from melting down.

A Quarter Million!

Thank you

Now more!

[Kind Words] (lo fi chill beats to write to) is now available on Steam!

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Other changes

• Room decorations do a little dance when you click on them
• Added Australian mental health resources
• Remaining line indicator when writing
• Prevented accidentally fast closing paper airplanes by double clicking

Big update today for Kind Words Steam beta testers and Humble owners!

Paper Airplanes!

Full History

More

• Steam cloud saving!
• Updated mixes for all music tracks!
• Music volume slider!
• More reporting options!
• Secret stuff that's not unlocked yet but might turn out to be new stickers. Who knows?!